And just like that, the first month of the New Year is almost over.
Even though January is usually a good month for me, I have to say that this month feels well above average. It helped that I “started” the New Year early by doing my biggest task a full week before 2018 was over: to clean up the mess that was my room and to get rid of the clutter that I have amassed over the years.
Like most people on this earth, I am a somewhat of a hoarder. Is there such a thing as a mild hoarder? If there is, I definitely fall into that category as I find it difficult t get rid of the little things that technically I don’t need. Proof: up until this point I still had a bookshelf full of the books that I used in college. Why is that so horrifying, you ask? Because college for me happened over a decade ago and I have honestly not cracked those book open since those days.
While I am usually good at being on top of the clutter by having a semblance of a working organization system, 2018 had been a massive failure in that front. It had been an excellent year in terms of travel but because I went on four different trips last year, good God, was I exhausted. I was technically out of the country for a full two months and all of the prep (visa application, itinerary planning, etc), the post-trip laziness on top of my somewhat active social life straight up left my little slab of space into a downright sty. Luggage were just parked in one corner of the room, thermal under things were just shoved into the closet as soon as they were out of the laundry, and the stack of unopened envelopes on my desk literally fell over at one point. It had been so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to take a photo for documentation purposes.
After all of the festivities of the holiday season, I got cracking on my task. It was a good thing I started with my closet because boy, did that take the longest time to sort out. I hadn’t quite decided at that point that I wanted to massively reduce the volume of my things but I guess subconsciously I knew that I had wanted that to happen because I was totally ruthless. ‘You’re never gonna fit into that again, just toss it!’ had become a mantra and before I knew it, three full days had passed and I had filled up two entire boxes of clothes.
This is what my closet looked like after. The biggest problem I encountered last year was that I had no designated space for the clothes I usually take with me when I travel. Part of the solution were shoe boxes – I repurposed them as stackable containers for my sleep wear, the long sleeve shirts, the thermals, the beach wear and all the other odds and bits. I managed to clear out enough stuff that I actually had space for my luggage on the weird shelf thing at the bottom of my closet (they went there after I finally managed to give them a thorough wipe down).
Energized with my small accomplishment, I moved onto the other side of the room and started tossing stuff from my junk drawers. One of those drawers held a stupid amount of wallets that I never ever used, so those got tossed into the donate pile, along with other crap from god knows when. The general rule was that if I honestly had not touched an item in the last three months, they were gone. The drawers are still in a messy state but at least now I can honestly say that all of the stuff in them are things that I want or need to keep.
I’m not going to lie; the hardest part to sort out was the books. There was a time when I was a massive book reader and with my semi-hoarder tendencies, I had managed to collect quite a number of them. Unfortunately with the advent of the Internet and smart phones, there’s quite a sizeable stack of those books that I have not even started to read. Even though it was difficult, I got rid of the books that I knew I was never going to read and the ones that I didn’t really enjoy that much. Obviously my Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings books got to stay because those are ultra special to me.
At the end of it all, I managed to get rid of about half of my stuff in the form one bookshelf and about nine boxes filled to the brim with random things. Luckily my aunt and cousins were more than willing to take them because I think they were thinking of holding some sort of a garage sale. The end product is still quite a lot of stuff but right now I am quite happy with how this space looks. With most things, the whole process was difficult, but worth it.
It’s now almost been a full month since I finished this project and I am happy to say that while it’s now a little bit dustier, things are still in their tidy state. The biggest change that I noticed from before I started downsizing was that I actually like spending time in this room again. Before I would just go in here to change my clothes, dump my stuff from work on a chair, go into another section of the house and not go back until it’s time to sleep. Now, I kind of regularly watch TV in here again, which is kind of shocking to me because I honestly had not done that since June last year (I considered getting rid of the TV but I had found a decade old bootleg copy of Ugly Betty and decided to keep the TV and DVD player).
Also another thing that I noticed was the fact that I felt more energized in this space. A few days after sorting out this room, I managed to do the same thing with the contents of my car. I’m proud to report that while IHKA still needs a proper vacuuming, it’s nowhere near as messy as it had been before.
Weirdly, this whole thing bled onto the financial aspect of my life as well. When my mother first saw how spacious my room had become, the first thing she said to me was ‘Now you can buy more stuff to put in your room!’ I knew that my semi-hoarder tendencies had to come from somewhere, LOL. That off the cuff comment got me thinking really hard about my impulse buying habits though, because the advent of Lazada, Shoppee and Ebay definitely contributed to the all of the clutter. It was at that moment that I had committed to a no-spend January just to keep myself from buying trinkets to clog up the space. So far that’s been going well but I think I’ll talk about that on my next post.
On a side note, I swear that this whole thing was not brought upon by Marie Kondo’s Netflix series. While I have heard of her, I don’t have Netflix, LOL, and I have yet to watch her series. I did, however, come across this Youtube video below and thought that the challenge to create one habit every month of 2019 was an interesting one.
How about you? Tell me about how you spent the first month of 2019 in the comments below.
